- Author: Diana Bryggman
No, not the latest suggestions for your dry Mediterranean garden, but a different type of review this month. My twenty-something children gave me a gift subscription to Netflix for Christmas, probably because they were horrified to learn their father and I have become devotees of “Dancing With the Stars”. I don't know if this was their intention or not, but I am now able to watch reruns of “Rosemary and Thyme”, the wonderful BBC show that ran on PBS only from 2003-2007. Once you meet Rosemary Boxer and Laura Thyme, plantswomen extraordinaire and detectives as well, you won't be able to stop watching this series. I always enjoyed it on PBS, but was frankly never quite sure when it would air. It seemed to be more of a “pledge-week tease” than a regularly scheduled program.
Here's the brief: Rosemary Boxer is a plant pathologist and Laura Thyme is a retired policewoman who work together in a “gardening consultancy”. They travel all over England, and occasionally beyond, to recreate old gardens, often using the original landscape plans they have unearthed somehow. They are regularly commissioned to restore overgrown or abandoned gardens and they (well, their set-dressing gardeners) produce wonderful results. While you watch the planting process, and hear them discuss the virtues of many species we are able to grow easily in Northern California, you will of course be entertained by their detective work, which invariably requires them to solve at least one murder. While searching for the thief who is lifting their newly-planted curry plant, Helichrysum italicum, from a lovely area they are redoing in Kensington Gardens, they of course discover a dead body, and so the search for the plant thief takes a back seat to the search for the murderer.
The show gives its viewers a wonderful overview of some old English landscapes as well as the occasional Mediterranean resort. One episode finds the gardener-sleuths planning and planting a “presentation garden” at a Spanish tennis resort that could just as easily have been located anywhere in California. While you tour the countryside from the ladies' ancient Land Rover, you will gather wonderful ideas for plant combinations and garden layouts.
“Rosemary and Thyme” is the perfect antidote for a rainy day when gardening is not appealing. And while I wait for that day to come to Solano County, I think I will go out looking for Helichrysum italicum, a perennial that needs moderate water and grows in Sunset Zones 13-24. Its pale grey leaves and delicate branching seem like a perfect foil to the spiky, reddish Cordyline australis I relocated today, in an effort to clear out a crowded bed.
Or perhaps I will just rest and seek further inspiration with another episode of “Rosemary and Thyme”.